7th September – Threat Intelligence Report
Check Point weekly bulletin: exploited SonicWall SMA 1000 zero-days (CVE-2026-83548/49), JFrog Artifactory auth bypass, and a 2.8M-patient Baylor Genetics breach.
Check Point's weekly bulletin covers breaches including Thomson Reuters' C-Track platform (court records across 11 US states and Canada), Baylor Genetics (2.8M patients and employees, SSNs included), Hit casinos in Slovenia, and Dropbox (~5,000 accounts via abused Lenovo email verification). SonicWall patched two exploited SMA 1000 zero-days, including CVE-2026-83548, a CVSS 10.0 pre-authentication SSRF, while JFrog fixed exploited authentication bypass CVE-2026-82329 (CVSS 9.8). Malware and actor coverage includes Gambling Goblin, JSCeal, Mirage Kitten's NodeRabbit/PollCat campaign, and DPRK Contagious Interview macOS activity, plus a FalconFlank privilege-escalation PoC against CrowdStrike Falcon.
Malicious MCP Servers Can Split Instructions to Make AI Coding Agents Exfiltrate Secrets
ASSET Research Group's GhostSplice technique splits malicious instructions across MCP channels, tricking AI coding agents into exfiltrating SSH keys, source code, and secrets.
ASSET Research Group disclosed GhostSplice, a prompt-injection technique in which a malicious Model Context Protocol (MCP) server splits an exfiltration instruction across a tool description and a tool result so no single fragment appears harmful. In the reference implementation, a benign-looking integrity_checker tool with fields alpha through delta is later paired with a project-scan result mapping those fields to .ssh/id_rsa, proprietary source, customers.csv, and .env. Tests across eleven API-tested models showed average compliance rising from 42% to 82% when instructions were split in two, with GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Llama 3.3 70B going from 0% to 100%. The findings come from controlled lab tests, not a reported real-world intrusion, and no CVE identifiers had been assigned as of August 10, 2026.
Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks
Analysis found 227 install commands from Claude, Codex, and Hermes agents inside corporate networks pointing to packages with no verifiable owner.
Researchers found 227 install commands issued by the AI coding agents Claude, Codex, and Hermes inside corporate environments, with the referenced packages having no clear owner. The finding highlights agentic software supply-chain risk, as AI agents can pull unverified third-party code into production networks without organizational oversight. The article is published in Ars Technica's security section and frames this as an emerging governance gap for AI-driven development.
nex-agi/Nex-N2.5-Pro — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face
Nex-AGI launches Nex-N2.5 agentic model family (mini/Pro/Max), with Max built on a 1.6-trillion-parameter MoE foundation.
Nex-AGI introduced Nex-N2.5, a next-generation family of agentic models in three sizes (mini, Pro, Max) focused on long-horizon agentic tasks including computer use, web browsing, and autonomous program execution. Nex-N2.5-Max is built on a 1.6-trillion-parameter text-only Mixture-of-Experts foundation, marking the company's first complete post-training effort at trillion-parameter scale. Weights will be released open-source on Hugging Face and ModelScope, with hosted access via OpenRouter. Benchmark comparisons against Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Kimi-K3, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813, and Qwen3.8-Max show competitive scores on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-Bench Pro, though weights were listed as "coming soon" at publication.
Chinese Hackers Use AI Agents in Multi
China-linked campaign used the SecFlow AI-agent framework (Claude, Qwen, DeepSeek) to automate intrusions against government targets in Taiwan, Indonesia, China and Vietnam.
Hunt.io documented a second China-linked campaign wiring commercial AI models into live cyberespionage, reconstructing the SecFlow orchestration system from five accidentally exposed open directories. Targets included Taiwan's Kuomintang Party archives, Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, mainland Chinese government and education systems, and Vietnamese industrial hosts. The most extensive compromise hit a Fengtai District government Office Automation environment, yielding LSASS and registry hive theft, 822 user records and 1.28GB of attachments including patient health data. Tooling included a GLUTTON webshell hiding payloads in PNG pixels via steganography and a fake MySQL deserialization service for client-side code execution.
US Agencies Warn Chinese AI Firms Are Extracting Advanced AI Models
NSA, CISA, and FBI accuse six Chinese AI firms including DeepSeek and Alibaba of industrial-scale distillation of US frontier models.
A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI advisory alleges DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens across millions of requests from US frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok since at least late 2024. DeepSeek reportedly ran an organized campaign against Claude, GPT, and Gemini between late 2024 and mid-2025 that aided R1 and V3 development, including chain-of-thought reasoning extraction. Reported techniques included shared premium accounts, gray-market proxy 'transfer stations,' automated failover, and prompt injection that made Claude Code believe it was a MiniMax product. The advisory recommends detection signals such as 24/7 multi-IP account usage and covertly serving degraded responses to suspected distillers.
ThreatsDay: AI-Powered Hacking, 370 Chrome Flaws, SonicWall Attacks, DNS Hijacking + 22 More Stories
Users in Houthi-Held Yemen Tried to Develop Advanced Weapons With AI, Anthropic Says
Anthropic says Claude users in Houthi-held northern Yemen attempted hypersonic missile and guidance software development; accounts were blocked, no operational weapon fielded.
Anthropic's third misuse report since March 2025, covering December through August, says users in northern Yemen ran three weapons programs, including a multi-variant hypersonic glide missile and a warhead maneuvered mid-course with mobile phone hardware. The users used Claude Code instead of human engineers to develop guidance, navigation and control software, conducted one failed guided rocket test, and built an offline simulation toolkit before Anthropic banned the accounts. Houthis denied relying on open sources for weapons development, and analysts noted they lack the industrial capacity to actually build hypersonic missiles.
GPT-6 Astra, Looped Transformers, and Hidden Reasoning
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, its strongest model to date, with standout 3D rendering and computer-use performance and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3.
Sebastian Raschka reviews OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, calling it the best model he has used, with disproportionate gains in 3D rendering, animation, and computer use through the Codex/ChatGPT harness. The model scores 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 versus 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol and leads the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, though gains on independent aggregate indices are more incremental. The article also explains looped transformer/recurrent depth architecture rumors, speculation that Astra hides its chain-of-thought reasoning, and recent research insights on the topic.
Autonomous AI Agents Compromise Thousands of Credentials in Under Six Hours
Google's GTIG reports threat actors using autonomous AI agents, credential stealers, and LLMs to steal AI models, API credentials, and harvest thousands of credentials.
Google Threat Intelligence Group says attackers are targeting proprietary AI models across healthcare, government, and media, exfiltrating API credentials, and co-opting victim cloud environments to run unauthorized AI workloads. TeamPCP (Altered Spider/UNC6780) is conducting supply chain compromises of PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub, deploying the SANDCLOCK and DUSTMAKER credential stealers, with DUSTMAKER using AI workspace poisoning and prompt injection for defense evasion. One financially motivated actor used an autonomous multi-agent framework to compromise thousands of third-party credentials in under six hours without human intervention. China-nexus groups UNC6508 and Basin Castle (Mustang Panda) used local open-weight LLMs and commercial LLMs like Gemini, Claude, and Codex for espionage tasks and evading provider monitoring.
Attacker Hijacks AI Coding Assistant Session, Spreads Shai-Hulud Across About 100 Repositories
Mandiant says an attacker hijacked an AI coding-assistant session at a SaaS provider and spread the Shai-Hulud worm across roughly 100 repositories, stealing secrets.
Mandiant's September 2026 report describes an attacker hijacking an active AI coding-assistant session at an unnamed SaaS provider, then getting a poisoned package recommendation accepted and installing an infostealer via a malicious PyPI package. The attacker stole GitHub OAuth tokens, deployed the self-spreading Shai-Hulud worm across approximately 100 internal repositories, and stole repository secrets and product source code. Poisoning a package in the company's official namespace caused a second employee to pull the compromised version and become infected. Mandiant recommends verifying AI-recommended dependencies against checksums and allowlists, keeping secrets out of extension reach, and routing dependency traffic through internal repositories.